Kevin Turvey

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Kevin Turvey was a popular British television comedy character created by actor and comedian Rik Mayall for the BBC sketch show A Kick Up the Eighties in 1981.

Turvey was a self-styled "investigative journalist" who still lived with his mum, always wore a shapeless blue anorak, fancied a local girl called Theresa Kelly (who was never actually seen), and rarely ventured outside his native town of Redditch. Each week, his "investigations" would amount to no more than a rambling, uninformed monologue delivered in an over-excited manner direct to camera, voiced in his broad and somewhat monotonous West Midlands accent.

In 1982 a one-off mock-documentary, "Kevin Turvey - The Man Behind The Green Door" was broadcast. In this, a BBC 'fly-on-the-wall' camera crew followed Kevin around for a week as he went about his "investigations." Robbie Coltrane played Mick the lodger (who was obviously AWOL from the Army), Adrian Edmondson played Keith Marshall, and Gwyneth Guthrie played Kevin's mum. Roger Sloman appeared as a psychotic park-keeper. Making guest appearances as part of Kevin's band The 20th Century were Simon Brint and Rowland Rivron, collectively better known as Raw Sex.

In interview, Mayall once described Kevin Turvey as just "an accent and a mood from South-West Midlands" where he (Mayall) had grown up.

A subsequent "accent and mood" character called Siadwell appeared on the TV series Naked Video. John Sparkes, the comedian behind the Welsh Siadwell, was apparently inspired by Kevin Turvey.

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